How Marcus Blaze Beat Carter Young | WTT 2025

Here we have Marcus Blaze, a phenomenal High School wrestler, going up against Carter Young, no slouch by any means.

2:30 in the first, Carter Young gets a takedown off of a pass-by. This is a really slick move by Young, when someone goes pass-by you can push with your elbow to make them slip off of your elbow and then try to catch behind as they fall in front of you. First time I saw this was by Keith Gavin who coaches at Pitt now. It’s super slick, easy to fall off of, and is executed very nicely. Young gets behind Blaze who is forced to base down to the mat to not give up an easy suplex. Blaze kind of fell into this, not much he could do about it once Young got the angle. 2-0 Young.

Young then drops down to the ankles and is able to pull them together for a leg lace. Blaze does do the right thing, keeps his knees apart, but size might be the difference maker here, as it doesn’t really matter. Young rolls under for the 2 points, loses track of the ankles, but holds on for the reset. 4-0 Young.

31 seconds left in the period, Blaze is chasing down a shot and Young steps out of bounds, giving him an incidental step out point, 4-1 Young.

Almost a minute into the second, Blaze goes for a righty single, not much of a setup, and so Young is able to react pretty well, sprawl, digs behind the shoulder for the go behind, but Blaze is somehow able to circle away and make Young slip off of his legs. Young didn’t apply enough bodyweight to the go behind, which is what allowed this separation to happen. David Taylor preaches having his chest on the shoulder and applying body weight as you circle around behind, and this just wasn’t a thing.

Blaze immediately jumps on a front headlock, attacks the left side, almost like he’s looking to go cradle, lets go, snaps the head down again, grabs an arm drag, gets around behind. This drag worked well because he didn’t just dig behind the shoulder, but had a piece of the arm, and also because he had body weight applied. 4-3 Young.

1:46, Blaze gets onto a leg, snaps that left hand down and attacks the same side angle. Blaze gets a good piece of it and so comes up with the leg and then Young dives under for some funk, but there’s way too much momentum going forward. In freestyle you can’t roll across your back, right, but in Folkstyle you can. So usually in freestyle if someone goes for funk like this they don’t dive under, and they try to keep forward momentum to a minimum, so they can kind of balance on their head and stay off of their back as they create some chaos or come up with the leg, but no such luck here. This gives Blaze a little bit of a break as Young just kind of gives him 4 points.

26 seconds left, Young pops the elbow up and goes for a lefty high crotch which turns into a single, but he doesn’t come up with it right away. He would have had to immediately get height, and that stutter allows Blaze to get to a nice sprawl. A lot of really strong wrestlers may be able to come up from this position, Yianni comes to mind, but Blaze does a really good job of breaking Young down. Here you want to keep your knees off the mat, opposite hip down, circle away from the shot, lift the near ankle to break them down, then you lift the far elbow to make them let go of the leg. Blaze does almost all of these steps, breaking Young down completely, and is able to get another 2 points for his efforts as time runs out, bringing the score to 9-4, Blaze.